It Was All a Giant Farce

So, while I was sleeping, the Winter Olympics opened and the government closed, at least for a while. The latter was not as entertaining as the former. The Olympics had a shirtless Tongan. The Congress had Rand Paul. No contest there.

For the purposes of this post, I am suspending the blog’s Five-Minute Rule regarding the public utterances of members of the Paul family. To recap, the rule states that anything one of the Pauls says makes sense for exactly five minutes. At 5:00:01, however, the ideas go completely off the rails to the point where you wonder if you’ve been under hypnosis for the previous five minutes. I am suspending the rule on this occasion because Rand Paul’s performance on Thursday, in which he dragooned the United States Senate into being bit players in his next fundraising commercial, was idiotic straight from the jump.

Aqua Buddha was shocked—shocked!—that his Republican colleagues suddenly became enamored of deficit spending. Of course, he had no problem a few weeks ago voting for the deficit-exploding tax cut of abomination, but 35 years of Republican economic orthodoxy holds that tax cuts increase revenue. Of course, this has been proven wrong every time the Republicans gain enough power to put this fantasy into practice, but Paul wasn’t speaking to that, either. He trotted out every cheap trick in his bag, mocking scientific studies with funny names, and he even summoned up the ghost of the late William Proxmire, whose “Golden Fleece” awards were a comedy staple in the Senate during a different time.

And the whole thing was a preposterous farce. The bill was priced to move and all Paul accomplished, besides burnishing his rep among his several fans, was to inconvenience whoever it is that’s at work in the federal government at three in the morning. The bill finally passed both houses of Congress just as the sun was coming up, and the president* signed it as soon as it hit his desk. All that was left was the bitter recriminations.

The DACA beneficiaries are still out in the cold, their fates hanging on a promise from Mitch McConnell. (N.B.: McConnell’s promise was premised on the government’s staying open. Technically, of course, it didn’t, and McConnell is quite the weasel. If he wanted an out, he’s got one.) Republicans who still believe in the fiction that theirs is the party of “fiscal responsibility”—Bob Taft is dead, and he ain’t coming back, kids—are weeping and gnashing their teeth over what their party “stands for” any more. It stands for what it’s stood for ever since Ronald Reagan fed the party the monkeybrains. It stands for plutocracy and corporate laissez-faire, with a leavening of sanctimony and a pinch of Jesus.

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However, the various complaints about the production of this particular sausage should not blind us to the simple fact that the Republicans control the entire government and that they still couldn’t get this done without begging the Democrats, on whom they subsequently blamed the whole business. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, remains the biggest political faker of my lifetime and probably the worst Speaker of the House, too. The Republican Party is in charge of everything and it…cannot…govern. At all.

There will be a deluge of both-siderism in the wake of Thursday night’s festivities; Nancy Pelosi may well be lined up with Aqua Buddha as equal nuisances, which is absurd, but there you are. There will be a lot of hand-wringing about our dysfunctional national government. All of it will be unmitigated swill. The country elected Republicans, and Republicans, who have built a movement on contempt for the process of governing, turn out to be aggressively lousy at it. That has been a plague on our politics for three decades. It continues.

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